Respect. Now. Always.
A whole-of-community campaign for the prevention of sexual violence
Campaign | Visual Communication | Participatory Design | Co-Design | Design Research | Strategy | Social Impact | Culture Change
Starting in 2017, the award-winning UTS Respect.Now.Always. (RNA) Campaign has aimed to create cultural change by challenging the attitudes and behaviours that support sexual assault and sexual harassment, through whole-of-community engagement and participatory co-design.
The campaign attracts students and staff to an unprecedented public conversation about sexual violence: over 8000 people have attended public activations on campus over three years. These activations (often held during student orientation) feature artefacts designed to attract, engage and educate participants around the prevention of sexual violence.
Historically, strategies for eliminating sexual violence have focused on deterrence through punishing offenders, and punitive warnings around the consequences of offending. These approaches breed fear, can alienate and confuse people, and paradoxically do little to deter individual instances of offending. The light-hearted "Wanna Spoon? Ask First!" ice-cream themed campaign branding challenges these approaches, giving participants the opportunity to reflect, talk and be listened to, and encouraging nuanced discussion of a topic that often confuses, upsets and silences people. The bright visual communication represents a clear departure from the norm of grim, confronting text and imagery focused on illegal behaviour.
The activation spaces are curated so participants experience highly accessible education through conversations, questions, interactive games and activities, guided by staff and student volunteers. While building sexual violence literacy and intervention skills, these activities have also provided research data on community perceptions. Topics addressed have included attitudes that underpin sexual violence, bystander intervention and support services, through interactive modes such as sticker voting, poster writing, photo booths, competitions and dialogue. Free ice-cream is served, with flavours re-named with consent-related puns developed with students in social media competitions. Merchandise (including t-shirts, condoms and stickers) enable participants to publicly declare their support of consent and respect.
Sexual violence campaigns are generally based on an 'information' model of one-way communication. Our campaign combines community education and research in a two-way learning cycle, where students discuss and reflect on the subject matter, while researchers discover the student & community perspectives and their educational needs regarding sexual violence. Over time, the evolving campaign has generated significant research insights which have been synthesised and are being implemented in a community co-designed Strategic Framework to guide future University action.
The co-design approach increases community engagement and ownership. Students have often indicated that they feel they have an increased voice in the system. Almost 400 students and staff volunteered to help run and evolve the activations and several community-led prevention initiatives have been implemented. The high levels of participation in campaign activations, positive responses, and appetite for community ownership of a campaign focussed on such a difficult topic highlight the positive impact that design can have on social, cultural and organisational change.
In 2020, UTS and the Design Innovation Research Centre won an Australian Good Design Award - Best in Class for Social Impact - for ongoing work in this campaign. We also wrote about it in a peer-reviewed research paper, and discussed in a UTS article
Image Credits: Kat Pereira; Domenic Svejkar; Design Innovation Research Centre; Rushly Images; Daniel Snell